All!

The Fourth Sunday of Easter (RCL, Year B)
May 3, 2009

The Reverend Paul Abernathy

“I am the good shepherd (who) lays down his life for the sheep.”^[1]

I wrestle with sheep, that is, the imagery of sheep. So foreign it is to my daily existence. I can’t recall the last time I saw sheep. The most recent experience of any kind was this past Christmas Eve at our annual pageant when several of our children, regaling us in retelling the story of the nativity of Jesus, were dressed as sheep. (Of course, in our typical St. Mark’s-efforts toward inclusivity, other animals were represented. A horse, a donkey, some cats and dogs, an alligator, a giraffe, a lion, a rabbit, and a turtle!) But that’s as close as I’ve come recently to sheep.

Yet, I suppose when I do think of sheep, as I did yesterday in reflecting on our gospel passage, my mind, at first, gamboled through a mental pastoral setting – verdant pasture, a flock kept together, watched over by a brave, ever vigilant shepherd, ready to lay down his or her life (remember the reference in the children’s hymn, I sing a song of the saints of God, is to “a shepherdess on the green”) for the living, breathing, four-legged woolly collection of the family’s riches.

Traditionally, this image has been considered to have “worked” theologically when it evoked in us wonder, verily, worship of the Jesus, the good shepherd, who in his crucifixion laid down his life for us, his sheep. However, this has proven problematic for many post-modernists who, existentially, refuse to be compared to sheep, not the brightest animals in the world, and, more practically, reject the notion of needing to be saved, particularly from an original sin they didn’t originate.

Yet, the thing about sheep that we need claim is that essential aspect of our humanness of our need for care and, even more, that we, even at our unsheep-like best and brightest, simply don’t know it all and can’t have all, at times, any answers.

This truth of our human beingness alone compels me to listen afresh to Jesus’ message – “I am the good shepherd (who) lays down his life for the sheep” – hearing in it a bold and radical call to us that all the pleasant Christmas pageantry and traditional interpretations can neither, on the one hand, reflect, nor, on the other, obscure.

Jesus’ claim to be a good shepherd, as self-identifying as it is, also is a call to us, a claim on us, all who consider ourselves followers of Jesus. Jesus, as much as he is talking about himself, is saying something about us – who we are and to whom we belong.

Point is we don’t belong to ourselves, but rather to Jesus and, even more, to one another. Verily, our identity derives from our being sheep – a word in the English language for which there is no singular form. In other words, our truest identity is not in our separateness, but rather, in our being members of – belonging to – a flock. For it is our life in community, even in the community of two in our most intimate relations, that defines most clearly for each of us our individuality.

And thank goodness, thank God, Jesus, the good shepherd (good, not meaning meek and mild, but rather, generously, radically hospitable) defines the community – “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold (and) I must bring them also.”

Left to each of us, no doubt, we would be tempted – and, perhaps, succumb to the temptation – to make our chosen company a society of our peers. Jesus calls as his flock all whom he sees and knows and loves, all for whom he gave his life, all who would come together to break bread, sing songs, pray prayers, pass the peace. All.

And all of it so that we might learn the way of the one who lays his life down for others. All of it so that we, even we, will “know love by this, that (as) Jesus laid down his life for us (then) we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”^[2]

[1] John 10.11. The gospel passage appointed for the day is John 10.11-18.

[2] 1 John 3.16. The epistle text appointed for the day is 1 John 3.16-24.